How Google Earth Is Preserving, Sharing Indigenous Culture

RIO DE JANEIRO – In an effort to preserve its traditional way of life, one Amazon tribe has turned to innovative technologies, particularly Google Earth.

The Surui people, native to Brazil's Rondonia state, released a detailed cultural map of their ancestral lands, embedded into Google Earth, during U.N. sustainable development conference Rio+20. The map is a way to publish their unique story and share it with a global audience.

"These days you can't separate talking about culture from talking about technology, there's no separation between these things," Chief Almir Surui told Mashable. "You also can't talk about sustainable development seperated from technology."

To create the map, some 90 million trees were planted into the Surui forests on Google Earth. Looking through the interactive content, you can find the locations of parrots, toucans and jaguars. You can learn about where the Acai trees, which provide delicious fruit and thatch used for housing materials. You can see the best locations to hunt wild pigs.

Beyond the natural highlights of the land, the map includes stories of historic battles with other tribes and the location of the first contact the tribe made with settlers in 1969, who entered the land while building a highway through the Amazon. As the tribes' elders die, the map is able to preserve their recollections of history.

"Culture's not something that's static, it's something that evolves, but we also recognize the value of our history and our culture and protect that," Chief Almir says. "It's important to use technology to record the evolution of our culture because the world has to know who we are and where we want to go."

The project began in June 2007, when Chief Almir proposed a partnership to Google, in which the tribe would put its portion of the Amazon into Google Earth. The below documentary, "Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops: Carbon and Culture" details the five year relationship between the tribe and the Google Earth Outreach team.

The Surui tribe has also created a Portuguese language website, Paiter.org, which hosts more information about the community.

Surui Youth Embrace Technology

The bulk of the cultural map was put together by a handful of young members of the Surui tribe. Though you may not expect teenagers who live in the Amazon rain forest to be avid social media users, the group couldn't even keep from checking their Facebook for the duration of our meeting.

Where did they pick up their social media addiction? Their father and tribe leader, Chief Almir.

When the Google team, led by engineering manager Rebecca Moore, taught young members of the Surui tribe to use Android smartphones to take photos and videos of their lands, the bunch quickly embraced the tool. Using a custom program, the tribe's youth could send collected data directly to a Google Earth map from different locations in the forest.

The youngsters collected stories from the tribe elders, which have been documented in nearly 300 sites on the map. Many of the stories come from before the tribe's first contact, so this cultural map will now preserve primary records of their history in the cloud.

"There are a lot of stories that we didn't know," Walelasoepilemân Surui, 14, told Mashable. "As the older people die off, we can preserve those histories and pass them forward through projects like this."

Global Impact

When you look at the Surui lands on Google Earth today, you can see they are surrounded by rampant deforestation. To avoid the devastating spread of logging on their territory, the Surui have developed a carbon monitoring program, which is the first of its type to receive international recognition. The program sells the carbon offsets of the Surui's land's trees, which corporations can purchase to counterbalance their negative toll on the environment.

"We will show the world the importance of having living forests, without these living forests, you don't have indigenous culture," Chief Almir says. "I'm not somehow going to lose my sense of being indigenous, but without the forest I can't practice rituals and experience my culture."

When corporations around the world choose to purchase carbon stock from the Surui people, they can easily turn to the cultural map in Google Earth, to understand the culture where they are investing their money.

"It's not just about absolute Greenhouse gas reduction, there's a social impact to buying Surui carbon," Moore says. "But it's not just for carbon buyers, interested students and the worlds can learn about this people."

Since hearing about the Surui tribe's project, indigenous tribes around the world have reached out to Google Earth Outreach for help creating similar projects. Moore says a number of other tribes in the Amazon, as well as the M?ori people of New Zealand, First Nations of Canada and American Indian tribes have expressed interest in making their own cultural maps.

"This isn't only about the preservation of culture," Alnir Oyexiener Surui, a youth involved with the project, says. "This will make it possible for people outside our tribe to learn the value of sustainability, because they'll be exposed to it."